“Your walls are the most prominent surface in your house and the best way to display your personality,” says Vern Yip, host of HGTV’s Deserving Design. Adding visual punch to your walls also helps balance the weight of your furniture. Start here.

TO MAKE A ROOM SEEM BIGGER . . .

- Paint the ceiling a lighter shade of the wall color (mix an 85-15 ratio of color and white). “This diminishes the line between wall and ceiling,” says Yip, “which creates a sense of volume.”

- Choose a reflective paint finish, like satin, semi-gloss, or gloss. This increases the perception of space by bouncing light back into the room, Yip says.

- Hang curtain rods at the top of the wall, no matter where the window is located, says Yip. Ceiling-to-floor curtains make a space seem taller.

TO MAKE A ROOM FEEL WARMER . . .

- Layer architectural elements. Example: Paint the wall a dark color, and then paint a square of a lighter complementary color in the center. Hang a photo or art inside the square. “Layering brings rooms together,” says Jennifer Bertrand, owner of Bertrand Designs in Olathe, Kansas. 

- “Use everyday objects as sculptural elements,” says Bertrand. If you’re into cycling, say, hang bicycle tires along a wall.

Window Treatments Saved My Life!

He was suddenly divorced and living alone. Luckily, he found a crutch: home decorating

By Victor Teran, Illustration by Guy Billout

“So a bed is the only thing you need today,” my mom concluded. “Don’t run out and buy a bunch of stuff just so your apartment looks full. Take your time. Figure out what you really like. And when you love something, and only then, buy it.”

I spent the next 2 hours wandering down rows of mattresses—sprawling, bouncing, and generally trying them on for comfort and size. It was fun. For the first time in my life, I was buying something meant for me and no one else. I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in a very long time: optimism. Starting from scratch suddenly wasn’t the bad news, but the good news.

Over the next few months, I canvassed Craigslist, wandered flea markets, and occasionally recruited Abby to accompany me to those absurdly expensive West Hollywood furniture galleries. I quickly developed a sense of what I like. A vision for my home started to crystallize.

On one of these reconnaissance missions, I ran smack-dab into an artifact from my married past—a rustic driftwood coffee table with sharp, modern lines and a dark chocolate finish. My ex and I had owned a nearly identical table. Toward the end of our relationship, we argued about it so often that it became a stand-in for our whole suite of marital problems.

Even though we’d picked out the table together, she grew to hate it. I still loved it, but instead of saying so, fearing she’d judge my taste, I argued against spending money on a new one. In the end, the table left, and so did I. Now, here I was looking at essentially the same table we’d picked up at a no-name furniture store for 500 bucks. The price tag: $2,200. All I could think was . . . I was right! That table is cool!

Seeing that coffee table sent my desire to decorate into overdrive. A few days later, I fell in love with a kitchen table I saw in Elle Decor. It had a sleek, steel-frame base and a natural wood top, and came with matching Alvar Aalto stools. I couldn’t remotely afford it. So, with no background in furniture design, carpentry, or steel fabrication—or in any other field that qualified me to hold a miter saw—I set out to make a DIY knockoff.

I figured I’d need 5 days. Three months later, I had something that bore very little resemblance to the table of my dreams. I had overestimated the height and underestimated the depth. Thinking all woods were created equal, I’d chosen cheap white pine, which made my table look more like a workbench. I’d attempted to save it by applying a coat of polyurethane. Now it looked like everything Ikea sells.

I abandoned the idea of making the stools and bought what, to my desperate eye, were passable Alvar Aalto knockoffs at Target. They were the wrong color. So I stained the tabletop to match, miscalculating by roughly seven shades of brown.

Exasperated, I ripped off the wood top and threw it away. This would have to be an original, not a cover.

I went to a scrap yard and found a perfectly distressed, rustic iron plate. The edges were so sharp, though, that I had it cut to the same dimensions as the table frame.

Finally, I was finished. Before me was an all-iron, too-narrow-to-be-a-dining, too-wide-to-be-a-console table that was cool in an ugly-pretty way but more or less useless. I was so proud. I invited Abby over to inspect my work.

“Where’s that thing supposed to go?” were her first words. This was the decorating equivalent of, “Is that really what you’re wearing tonight?”

“Uh, right there,” I said.

She contemplated for a few moments. Then she walked to my closet and pulled out two antique folding chairs I’d picked up at a flea market several months earlier. Abby arranged them around the table, alternating them with the Target stools. We both stepped back.

It . . . worked. The ensemble was oddball but didn’t look at all accidental. In fact, I liked it better than the table-and-chairs set I’d seen in Elle Decor. The amazing thing was, all the pieces were under my nose the whole time. Maybe decorating wasn’t so difficult after all.

That was a year ago. Today, I still have plenty of work to do. My apartment still has many sparsely decorated corners and a lot of blank walls. And then there’s the little matter of the nearly empty space I call my bedroom. I’m going to take a little more time with that one.

The good news is that I’m no longer afraid to make choices—or mistakes. Perfection isn’t my goal; not anymore. This is my home, and it’s always going to be a work in progress. Just like me